Students fighting battles

Editorial

The Arab-Israeli conflict is once again having repercussions on the battleground that is the North American university campus. Locally, students are being exposed to several of the more virulent strains that are spreading today.

British journalist Ben White spoke at the University of British Columbia, on Oct. 7, to a crowd of about 100. The subject: Israeli "apartheid."

B.C. students are familiar with this particular strain of anti-Israel speaker. Last year, Norman Finkelstein visited UBC, calling Israel "Spartan," "satanic" and a "terrorist state." Proudly controversial, Finkelstein did not shy away from his extremist message. Nor is Finkelstein likely to be any more reticent or civil when he speaks at the University of Victoria this weekend. (Having visited the Lower Mainland just last year, the former academic seems to have decided to skip over Vancouver on this particular cross-country tour.)

White acted as the gentle, mild critic; a style altogether different from Finkelstein's. Good looking and well dressed, White contrasted sharply with Finkelstein. And yet, behind the façade of blonde-haired, blue-eyed "innocence" echoed the age-old message of the classic anti-Israel propagandists.

White's general point is that Israel is committing a crime of South African-style segregation against both its Arab-Israeli population (whom White refers to as "Palestinian Israelis" or "Palestinian citizens of Israel"), as well as against the population of the Palestinian territories. Within Israel, White cited the "Judaization of Nazareth" as an example of a broad Zionist policy of "ethnic cleansing." He claimed that all Israeli governments, from Labor to Likud, have systematically tried to increase the Jewish population of both Israel and the territories, while restricting Arab migration and human rights.

White focused on the barrier that Israel has built to protect its civilians from mass murder, yet, of course, made no mention at all about Israel's legitimate security concerns. During the question-answer period, a contingent of students asked respectful yet challenging questions, including about the prospects for a two-state solution. White's response was that the two-state idea is "dead" – and that the settlers killed it. White and others ignore the reality that settlements have not historically been a barrier to peace. Yamit, the Israeli paradise in the Sinai Peninsula, was evacuated in 1982 for the sake of peace with Egypt. And who can forget the enormously divisive 2005 evacuation from Gaza, which saw more than 8,000 settlers pulled out of their homes in accordance with Ariel Sharon's unilateral disengagement plan.

Asked how he could convincingly call Israel's policies "rejectionist" in light of the offer that Ehud Barak made at Camp David to Yasser Arafat in 2000, White evaded the question entirely. An offer that would have seen the Palestinians create a state on more than 97 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of Gaza was brushed aside by White, who seems to see every Israeli concession as a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Though not as overtly extremist as Finkelstein, White is completely one-sided and unquestioning in his support for Palestinian "resistance."

And what qualifies White to critique the Israeli "apartheid" system? White has stated that he received eye-opening testimonials "from Palestinians I have met while visiting the occupied territories since I started going there in 2003." In other words, UBC students were treated to a guest speaker whose credentials seem limited to having visited the area on occasion. Oh, he also possesses a bachelor of arts in English literature.

The atmosphere on many North American university campuses is, on the whole, hostile to balanced or nuanced discussion of the Middle East. Though clearly not on the same level as incidences at Toronto's York University or the violence that has tarnished Montreal's Concordia, one Jewish student at UBC was called a "child killer" by a member of White's audience.

The B.C. Jewish community has a major challenge in defending Israel, especially in those places where the young and their ideas are being molded. At White's hate-fest last week and at Finkelstein's this weekend, it is Jewish students and their friends, often mobilized by Hillel, who are bearing the burden of such clashes. In place of reasoned, articulate and informed contextualization of complex historical and geopolitical realities, students are having simplistic, ill-founded slogans hurled back in their faces. It is a responsibility today's Jewish university students are unable to shirk and it is a fight from which they cannot back down.

^TOP